Alan Wallace: "The Retinal Blindspot in the Vision of Our Origins," Part 2

Among scientists, as polymath lecturer, Alan Wallace points out, it is still generally considered "impolite" to bring up the question of what 'consciousness' is. Consciousness, it seems, is still very much the 800-pound gorilla in the science lab or classroom.

Yet, as Wallace observes, William James (one of the fathers of modern psychology), in speaking on the subject of consciousness more than a century ago, remarked: "That which we ignore recedes from our experienced sense of reality." This is, of course, a danger that Wallace made clear in the first half of his extensive lecture (embedded below) highlighting the problem that consciousness still presents for the mainstream of Western science.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Wallace observes, we have more information about the 'Big Bang' and the nano-seconds thereafter than we do of the origins of human consciousness. "There are no scientific means," Wallace notes, "of detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in anything, including you or me right now."

It is odd, Wallace points out, that we have virtually no knowledge of something which is so intimate to each of us. "Right now," he observes, "if one were were to ask cutting-edge people, that is people working in the cognitive neurosciences . . . what are the necessary and sufficient causes for the origination of consciousness in a human being . . . the answer would be: 'We don't know.'"

Further, Wallace asks, what is the nature of matter? This, of course, is perhaps the great question - with 'some' solutions (matter is essentially the same as energy, Einstein demonstrated) - of the new physics that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century with the framing of both relativity and quantum theory. "There was something called twentieth-century physics," Wallace notes, "that makes the chunks of 'stuff' get very, very ethereal."

Wallace points out that "by the time you have the 'measurement problem' in quantum mechanics that makes at least suspect the very existence of quantum phenomenon before they are measured - in which the role of measurement remains a mystery in understanding the significance (and) the nature of the quantum realm - by the time you are speaking about probability waves that are being measured and that somehow collapse into actual particles . . . then matter has somehow become more ethereal than was assumed in the nineteenth century."

"You can," he notes, "(even) raise the question: 'Is there any energy in the nature of empty space itself?'" And the answer is, he points out, likely 'yes.' There is, he points out, a growing scientific consensus that the universe emerged from a quantum fluctuation and is imbued with 'dark energy'  and 'information' about the original fluctuation that we cannot even directly observe, although the mathematics indicates that it is there.

"As soon of you speak of the universe of space, time, mass, (and) energy as an emergent property arising out of a hidden (and) underlying dimension of information, the question of consciousness at least can be raised," Wallace observes. Information being, at least on its surface, a matter of the mind, the whole question of consciousness should therefore, according to Wallace, be once again kicked back into the scientific debate of just what the universe is. And yet, as he points out again, any scientific agreement that consciousness itself is a valid subject for scientific inquiry is still somehow lacking.

"Instead of simply assuming that the mind emerges from matter, Wallace concludes, it is possible now . . . and scientifically credible to consider the possibility that space-time and mass-energy all emerge from an underlying dimension of reality that may transcend the very duality of mind and matter."

And, it goes without saying, of course, that this very notion of a non-dual implicate order Wallace speaks of is the essential teaching of all the great Eastern (as well as some Western) wisdom traditions, a point that has not been lost on some of the leading-edge voices - scientific as well as spiritual - who, like Wallace, have probed the rarified and ethereal area where science and Eastern wisdom traditions seem to converge.

Mind or Brain? East or West?

Dean Radin, Ph.D.
Institute of Noetic Sciences

For a number of years Dean Radin, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has been doing leading edge research regarding the boundaries of the mind-brain interface and chaos theory. His research, and that of his colleagues around the world, have melded their research regarding the influence of 'mind' on 'randomness' into the "Global Consciousness Project," a collective effort which explores whether the intentions or attention of large numbers of subjects have any statistical effect upon the results produced by random number generators.

Describing this interface of the scientific study of so-called 'paranormal phenomena' and the 'mind sciences,' Radin observes that the research being done through the project "all devolves back into the question of what is the role of mind in the physical world."

"From a Western science point of view there isn't much," he observes. But in describing his own work, and that of his colleagues, Radin notes that both the intention and attention of individuals do appear to have an effect in the wider environment. In describing the fascinating results coming in from the Global Consciousness Project, Radin notes that he and his colleagues have come to the startling conclusion that there is "a context where we can infer there is a mental concurrence going on, sometimes due only to attention."

"We don't know whether it is simply a lot of human minds that are somehow changing randomness, or whether this is a reflection of something bigger, something like a collective mind," Radin notes, "a collective mind which includes everything else including what we think of as matter and energy."

It may be, he posits, that "the same kind of organizing event that changes random events also changes our attention."





In a related video, Radin explores how the leading edge of Western scientific inquiries into consciousness seem to be converging on the same conclusions reached by millennia of Eastern inquiry into the nature of the mind.

"If you keep following out on Eastern lore," Radin observes, "you find things (at some point) of 'mystical union' with the entire universe. At that level, the report is - the reports across cultures and throughout history - that the universe is not the meaningless object that Western science says that it is. But, rather, that the universe is permeated with meaning and is saturated with consciousness."

"There is consciousness everywhere," Radin notes, "in which case, while the Western viewoint is that your mind, your awareness, is locked inside this structure (the brain), from the Eastern viewpoint this structure is the entire universe, and you can experience it like that."

"Western science has not quite gotten to the point yet where it is able to verify that that's the case," he notes, "but I think the signs are very clear that that is becoming an interesting question. And methods are being developed to take Western science and move it along this continuum to begin to verify in Western terms what the mystics have been talking about for thousands of years."

"Fragments" from Bohm's "Implicate Order"

“. . . If there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For what we know is incomplete and what we prophesy is incomplete. But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will be done away with.. . . Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully . . ."

(I Corinthians 13:8-12)

David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

David Bohm, the renowned physical theorist - who was at once the contemporary, colleague and friend of both Einstein and the renowned spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti - proposed that there is a for-now imperceivable "Implicate Order" within which our perceivable universe (the "Explicate Order") unfolds. "I would say," he wrote in his treatise, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order," "that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment. . . ."

Over and over, Bohm observes that the basic problem we have in understanding ourselves, each other, and the basic nature of our 'reality' - particularly in the West, which is still in the grips  of a more-or-less 'classical' Newtonian worldview - is that we tend to break up or "fragment" the universe, the world, mankind, and even our thoughts, in order to 'understand' them, rather than trying to obtain a holistic vision of what we perceive.

"Being guided by this view," he observes, "man then acts in such a way as to try and break himself and the world up so that all seems to correspond to this way of thinking. He therefore obtains an apparent proof of his fragmentary self-world-view." (This echoes Einstein's comments about the commonly held world-view that he described as a sort of cosmic "optical delusion of [man's] consciousness.") It is a world-view that has grave implications, according to Bohm:

"Fragmentation is . . . an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to a general tendency to break up things in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive. . . .

When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to see himself first - his own person, his own group - he can't seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people. Even if he does try to put mankind first, he will perhaps think of nature as something different to be exploited to satisfy whatever desires he may have at the moment. Similarly he will think body and mind are independent actualities. . . . Physically this is not conducive to over-all health which means wholeness, and mentally, not to sanity which also has a similar meaning."

In a five-part 1989 interview (hosted on SeekerAfterTruth.com) that was filmed at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Bohm lucidly - given his vast knowledge, wide yet cohesive interests, and keen intellect - holds forth on a wide range of interrelated topics.  These include the relationship of the quantum and relativity theories to a holistic spiritual or metaphysical view of our 'reality,' the interconnectedness of all 'things' (including humankind) in a 'Wholeness,' the conflict between Western and Eastern worldviews, and the underlying 'deep roots' of the world's looming environmental problems - problems which stem from our treating world resources as separate "fragments" instead of the interrelated parts of a larger whole.

The "must-see" Bohm interviews capture one of the great minds, as well as great spiritual seekers, of the past 100 years at the height of his understanding of the "inter-relatedness" of all 'things' in the universe and our tendency to perceptively and conceptually break 'everything,' including (perhaps most importantly) our human interactions into 'fragmentary,' unrelated pieces.